Philosophy Practice

I don't know much about design but I know what I like--criticism
that takes me places I've never been, such as most of these brief
essays. The smiley face occasions a cogent history of happiness.
"The prohibition symbol"--the "no" slash--links up to the evolution
of diagonality and perpendicularity, with a side trip to theories
of infinity. Duchamp's chance art transports us deeper into
mathematics. An inauspicious-looking talk on New Mexico
counterposes Georgia O'Keeffe's idealization of nature against
Robert Oppenheimer's all-too-literal deconstruction of same, which
Lumpkin prefers. The stony gaze of the Las Vegas showgirl is traced
back to the Sumerian "Inanna, Queen of Heaven, sometimes referred
to as the Great Whore, and counterpart to the Great Mother, to whom
so many contemporary feminists seemingly gain easy access." And
that's two-thirds of the book.

Unfortunately, the final third--three attacks on the art of
"institutional feminism" plus an atypically uncolloquial closer--doesn't
bring it on home. Lumpkin has a nice way of yoking
erudition and theory to common sense, and is right to insist on
art's status as object in the world and object for sale. She
convinces me that most of the women's work she reviews is as
unwittingly proper and dreary to look at as she says. But while it
sure is catchy to point out that "feminism may ultimately prove not
to be good for the world; it may prove to be good only for women,"
the question of why women would want to live in this diminished
world is left too far open. Maybe the problem with the
"communitarian" ethics of the propagandists and hustlers she
despises isn't the strong root of that word but the wishy-washy
suffix. Maybe feminists should claim "communist" and let the chips
fall where they may. But this would hardly satisfy Lumpkin, who I'm
sure would continue to promote "contractual relations."

Nevertheless, Deep Design is a dense, engaging, provocative
little book. Vivid though the writing is, there's not much of the
lusciously palpable in it. Lumpkin's subject is indeed "design,"
not "art," and she focuses more on the philosophical and the social
than you might expect from someone whose passion is "visuality,"
art as "practice." But for someone whose passion is words--for a
reader--this is no drawback. Lumpkin has good reason to argue with
"the idea of art as a liberal art"--as a carrier of concepts, even
if her preference is more cyclical than she allows. Books, however,
are supposed to carry concepts. And Lumpkin clearly knows it.